reading

a sand county almanac (aldo leopold) i just cracked this and damn… i’m sucked into the reverse chronological history of this dude recounting the events that a tree has survived as he works to fell it. i doubt it was set up to be so engrossing, but it’s some beautiful and surprisingly moving writing. whether this is planned or instinctual is something i’d love to know. the diversity leopold describes in wandering around his property in 1940s wisconsin has me reading this with wikipedia in the other hand....

notes bookshop link i always have to take the cory doctorow with a grain of salt. this was a DSA fever dream, and i say this as someone who leans heavily in that direction. the main character is a pretty flat charicature of a liberal kid that grew up in a MAGA household. gramps was a MAGA who died; leaving him the owner of a house that he opts to turn into a four-story walkup to house climate refugees....

notes bookshop link a few years ago i learned there were no meaningful shop class options available in the local high school. the wood shop available today is sad and pathetic compared to the shop class i had in a middle-class midwestern suburb in the late 1980s. gen-X is probably the last generation to have shop class. there’s a lot swimming around the core “philosophy” in this book. a good chunk of it meta....

notes bookshop link honestly, this didn’t get really interesting until the last 50 pages or so. there’s a couple of hundred pages of setup on what constitutes a hack, examples of “hacks” across the spectrum of society, etc. there was a bit of less than obvious discussion around how some “hacks” become entrenched into the law, how common law interacts with these “hacks” and a generally slow/ossified capability of our governmental/legal systems to address the use of said hacks....

don’t forget … when generating tree output: tree --charset unicode will do the old-school output as opposed to that newfangled spiffy line drawing. if i were really thinking, i’d convert that to an alias, but i don’t know how pervasively this is supported. meta location: minneapolis, mn weather: crap